National News

Instagram back up, Facebook still down

14 March 2019

Instagram is back up after suffering a partial outage for several hours, the photo-sharing social network platform says in a tweet, but its parent Facebook Inc's app still seemed to be down for some users across the globe.

Certain users around the world were facing trouble in accessing widely used Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps earlier on Wednesday, in one of the longest outages faced by the company in the recent past.

"Anddddd... we're back," Instagram tweeted along with a GIF image of Oprah Winfrey screaming in excitement. Facebook did not provide an update.

Social media users in parts of United States, Japan and some parts Europe were affected by the outage, according to DownDetector's live outage map.

Facebook users, including brand marketers, expressed their outrage on Twitter with the #facebookdown hashtag.

The Menlo Park, California-based company, which gets a vast majority of its revenue from advertising, told Bloomberg it was still investigating the overall impact "including the possibility of refunds for advertisers."

A Facebook spokesman confirmed the partial outage, but did not provide an update. The social networking site is having issues since over 12 hours, according to its developer's page.

Facebook took to Twitter to inform users that it was working to resolve the issue as soon as possible and confirmed that the matter was not related to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

In a DDoS attack, hackers use computer networks they control to send such a large number of requests for information from websites that servers that host them can no longer handle the traffic and the sites become unreachable.